The idea is to work in 10-week sprints on projects that aim not to build finished products, but to produce polished, working models that show just what is possible with a huge amount of content, technological skill and a bit of imagination. The prototypes are shown across the corporation and, eventually, might see the light of day in some refined form.

The first product of the lab is this: the social media guide. It's a personalised aggregation tool for online media content, pulling in not just BBC TV and radio but your favourite content from YouTube, 4oD and the rest of the web. It's extremely sexy, but, alas, in closed beta and extremely hidden. So hidden that we're not allowed a screen grab of it in case anyone panics and thinks it's a real, finished product. Putting together a working model that looks designed and slick, rather than a scrappy development version, is an important factor in getting the idea across to non-techies, said Wright.

The main page shows a strip of five or six shows across the screen, and lets you start customising the screen by closing clips you don't like so that they don't show again, and adding clips by searching for them. Other friends signed up (on this demo it was other BBCers) can recommend shows to you, so they appear on the homepage. They are working on importing recommendations from existing sites, which could mean bringing in history or favourites from sites like Last.fm or The Filter.

There are two views of online recommendations, Wright said. The first is Amazon-style music recommendation, which is based on the biggest number of people with overlapping behaviour and that accounts for about 50% of use cases. The second is for media, but this is far harder to pin down because people tend to have much broader tastes in TV viewing; there's no relation between watching EastEnders and also watching the news, for example. Instead recommendations from friends provide far more accurate and compelling suggestions, though there's room for just a dozen or so.

"This is utility based, to we didn't want it to be like Facebook with too many friends. Do you really need more than 10 friends for recommendations? What's the tipping point where recommendation between friends becomes useful? We think it's about 10."

One extra recommendation feature adds suggestions from DJs, so Annie Mac fans could add her favourites and also forward suggestions for her show.

It's not to say there aren't services out there doing what this guide does already, but this slick lime green and black interface is styled like the iPlayer with that very accessible BBC-esque usability and there's a parallel version for both the iPhone and a customised NetGem set-top box. Those two offer a simplified form that includes "my favourites" or "recommended to me".

This fits exactly with the BBC Trust's recent decree that the corporation needs more external links: "We were absolutely delighted the trust said that," said Wright.

The guide was developed with two external startups: URIplay (who featured in a Google Tech Talk in April), the open source database of media content metadata which is used on top of the BBC's own /programmes information; and Two Worlds' device-aware technology, which came out of the BBC's Innovation Lab in Scotland last year.

Continuing to work with startups outside the BBC, as well as bring in BBC specialists from other departments on attachment, is one of RAD's challenges, said Wright, but important. "It's a cross-department take on experimental things. It's not about lots of iterations and then selling the idea in - we just do it."

There are lots of concurrent projects, some started before the lab opened in October including: P2PNext, a peer-to-peer live streaming project funded by the EU and shared with Pioneer and various European broadcasters; the Radio DNS project, which sees the BBC collaborating with commercial radio firms including Global on shared standards for embedding information online; and a project that allows rights-free BBC content to play in Totem, Ubuntu's media player.

Wright said the department is a relatively cheap way of innovating. "We use lots of open source and free software, and give back everything."